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Anthropology in the Meantime Experimental Ethnography, Theory

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Anthropology in the Meantime Experimental Ethnography, Theory ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE MEANTIME EXPERIMENTAL ETHNOGRAPHY, THEORY, AND METHOD FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY MICHAEL M. J . FISCHER ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE MEANTIME experimental futures Technological Lives, Scientific Arts, Anthropological Voices A series edited by Michael M. J. Fischer and Joseph Dumit ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE MEANTIME EXPERIMENTAL ETHNOGRAPHY, THEORY, AND METHOD FOR THE TWENTY-FIRS T CENTURY MICHAEL M. J. FISCHER Duke University Press Durham and London 2018 © 2018 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer i ca on acid- free paper ∞ Designed by Courtney Baker Typeset in Minion Pro by Westchester Publishing Services Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Fischer, Michael M. J., [date] author. Title: Anthropology in the meantime : experimental ethnography, theory, and method for the twenty-first century / Michael M. J. Fischer. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2018. | Series: Experimental futures : technological lives, scientific arts, anthropological voices | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2018005826 (print) | lccn 2018009816 (ebook) isbn 9781478002222 (ebook) isbn 9781478000402 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 9781478000556 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: Ethnology. | Anthropology. Classification: lcc gn316 (ebook) | lcc gn316 .F57 2018 (print) | ddc 305.8—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018005826 cover art: General Akashi Gidayu writes his jisei or death poem (seen in the upper right) as he prepares to commit seppuku. Akashi Gidayu, in the series One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, Tuskioka Yoshitoshi (aka Taiso Yoshitoshi), 1890. Wood block print. Courtesy of the author. Photo by Thorsten Trimpop. The jisei genre originates in Zen Buddhism and the three marks of existence (sanbōin): the material world is impermanent, attachment to it causes suffering, and all is emptiness. Such poems were written by poets, warriors, nobles, and monks, expressing an enlightened way of looking at death and real ity without affect or attachment (satori in Japanese, wu in Chinese). To my fellow journeywomen and men, colleagues and interlocutors, of the mit Laboratory for New Ethnographic Methods, Con temporary Social Theory, and Emergent Forms of Life (etl: Ethnography, Theory, Life) who have worked up and down the scales of multilocale ethnography from eagle- eye views to anaconda meanders, naga floodings of the fertile earth, desert oases, urban galactic polities, archipelago seas, and the habitats in- between. The dif­fer ent places have been enriching, the people inspiring, the diverse cultures exhilarating. But it was at the margins of all these individually brilliant experiences that I found the most enlightening of spaces and moments. They were so singularly beautiful that one had to invent vocabularies to describe them, these uncharted territories, unexperienced happenings, unfathomed depths, these images at the margins. — kuo pao kun (Chinese and En glish language playwright of Singapore), Images at the Margin Prologue: Changing Modes of Ethnographic Authority 1 PART I. ​Ethnography in the Meantime 37 1. Experimental Ethnography in Ink, Light, Sound, and Per for mance 39 2. Ontology and Metaphysics Are False Leads ​49 3. Pure Logic and Typologizing Are False Leads ​79 PART II. ​ Ground- Truthing 97 4. Vio lence and Deep Play ​99 5. Amazonian Ethnography and the Politics of Renewal ​114 6. Ethnic Vio lence, Galactic Polities, and the Great Transformation ​130 CONTENTS PART III. ​ Tone and Tuning 159 7. Health Care in India ​161 8. Hospitality ​186 9. Anthropology and Philosophy ​198 PART IV. ​ Temporalities and Recursivities 231 10. Changing Media of Ethnographic Writing ​233 11. Recalling Writing Culture ​258 12. Anthropological Modes of Concern ​276 Epilogue: Third Spaces and Ethnography in the Anthropocene ​298 Acknowl edgments ​345 Notes ​349 Bibliography 391 Index 429 PROLOGUE. CHANGING MODES OF ETHNOGRAPHIC AUTHORITY Along with Galileo, the malin [the evil in the world1] sweeps away the revolu- tionary illusion, the humanist hope. Descartes takes note of all this, accepting the setback but refusing to abandon hope. One must live. Once the revolution is over, the war of position begins. — antonio negri, Po liti cal Descartes No doubt, as will become clear in a few de cades, we live in another time warp like that of 1633, when, with Galileo’s condemnation and the burning of his books, the humanist crisis came to the fore, shocking such figures as Descartes into recognizing that humanist freedom had lost out against a flow of history that was no longer in favor of bourgeois, civil, and humanist ideals and would need an absolutist state as defense against both the nobles and revolts from below (Negri 1970/2006). According to Antonio Negri’s compelling reading, Descartes came to represent the world a fter the burn- ing of Galileo’s books “as malin, as inverted truth, as a fable of a power that does not want truth to live in the world” (Negri 1970/2006, 147; empha- sis in source). The arrow of history and conceptions of time do not move in one direction but move with variable speeds (accelerations, differential speeds), backward and forward (à la Karl Marx in The Eigh teenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon2), in ouroborus eternal returns (of the seasons, of cycles of life-de ath-lif e, of repressions-r eturns), spiral fashion picking up once aban- doned elem ents into new formations, with multiple competing streams, eddies, and currents, only retrospectively seemingly linear. New social structures and new “forms of life” (both biological and so- cial, sometimes quite intertwined) are emergent in ways we cannot quite foresee, despite confident predictions. If floods of populations flee rising seas, poverty, environmental toxicities, and tyrannies, and if receiving socie- ties are destabilized, health care systems collapse, and infrastructures are overwhelmed, in such circumstances, new forms of organ ization, good and bad, will form in the con-f usions, chemical like reactions, and sub-v ersion circulations— not necessarily as centralized totalitarian forms, or charis- matic cults, as past imaginaries would have it, but perhaps in decentralized weavings of new stronger textures of social life, post the hackable Internet of Things on which our critical infrastructures for living (wa ter, electricity, information) seem now to depend more fragilely than we thought only a few years ago. By then perhaps we will have renewable clean energy. By then perhaps we will have understood what it takes to live again in the oceans and in space, and to find biological repair mechanisms for what has been destroyed. Certainly, at the very least, in the meantime, the time of anthropology, will be one of constant experimentation. This is the space for ethnography, a third space of the “real ity princi ples” and “anthropology from a pragmatic point of v i e w,” 3 between the fantasies of nostalgia and apocalypse, between horizons of the Holocene and the Anthropocene. Here in this third space the actually existing worlds of anthropology from a pragmatic point of view can flour- ish: ask not what the human being or the world is but what we may expect of them— and of them in the plural. These worlds can flourish not merely by observation and participation but also by helping relay experiences in one place to other places, reflecting upon the experiences, and articulating what is going on beyond, inside, and around the formal structures of nation-s tates, transnational organ izations, and ngos, helping to rebuild newer, more flexible and robust structures from local municipalities and intentional commu- nities on up, using tools being developed, such as participatory budg eting, also in huge Asian cities.4 They can flourish by ground- truthing statistical patterns, algorithmic simulations, and governance metrics; by finding and propagating modes of flourishing, well- being, and new paths of conflict management, new multiscale synergies and mutualities. This book stakes out a claim, a twenty-fir st- century extension of the still canonical “grounded theory” of Barney Glaser and Anslem Strauss or the still valid advice of Robert K. Merton, that work at the mesolevel of theory is the most productive, what this book w ill call “anthropology in the mean- time.” Retooling for the twenty- first century is required, and is developing, in a context of more layered media (as research tools, as means of emotional persuasion in the public arena, and as habituated modes of communication) 2 Prologue and where small networks and local cultural niches can be leveraged and become as impor tant as standardization across such networks and worlds. “Anthropology in the meantime” is a methodological injunction to not get carried away by ei ther dystopian or utopian extrapolations that govern so much of con temporary “theory” but to do the ethnography of how the pieces of the world interact, fit together or clash, generating com- plex unforeseen consequences, reinforcing cultural resonances, and causing social ruptures. Anthropology and Ethnography in the Meantime Anthropology in the meantime is the (im)practical, life- affirming use of ethno- graphic methods in the gaps between the financial or design experimental (computational, prototyping, and “demonstrations-a s- products” to be con- tinually replaced) and the experiential experimental (slowing down, affect sa- voring, lifeworlds of playful artistry). The gaps between surprise-p roducing scientific experiments, pleasure- producing aesthetic experiments, and code- producing test- bed experiments are interactively productive ones. Th ese gaps are where anthropology reflectively and critically weaves its magic of understanding.5 These are the gaps between, on the one hand, the explo- sive energy of “now time” (Jetztzeit) that in sudden collisions of past and pres ent arrests or interrupts the flow of naturalistic time,6 and thus, on the other hand, dialectically, allows for the recursive reconstructions of, or re- configurations of the conditions of possibility for, the afterlives of now time, and thus of the work required to bring about livable, meaningful, emergent futures.
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